FARHAD MOSHIRI

Perrotin New York is pleased to present Snow Forest, the fifth solo exhibition at the gallery by Farhad Moshiri, internationally renowned for his innovative approach in the Neo-Pop style. The new body of works of the Iranian artist comes from old photographs of snowy trees shot by the artist several years ago in a forest in Iran. Moshiri is an ardent collector: he gathers all kinds of found forms and images, arranged according to shared iconographic principles. His new series deals with a certain frictional relationship with abstraction and color. Embroidered with beads and pearls, these images become contrasted landscapes, barely recognizable. They can evoke Mondrian’s Silver Tree from the 1910s, the nature in black and white paving the way to abstraction. Incorporating elements such as embroidery, crystals, and beads, the photographs become highly textured and sculptural. Setting up a new vocabulary in Moshiri’s work, Snow Forest articulates a different approach of ornamentation and imagery.

“Equally at ease with so-called high-brow and low-brow references, including Pop art, conceptual art, comics, advertising, classic portraiture, and religious iconography, Moshiri’s composite language is primarily a reflection of the different cultures that defined his growth as a human being and as an artist—a conflict that is still very much present today in contemporary Iran’s society, where Moshiri resides, and where the pillars that supported a secular civilization are subjected to daily reviews, questions and contaminations dictated by the inevitable progress of modern life. This factor, coupled with Moshiri’s attendance of the California Institute of Arts in the mid-1980s, where he first came into contact with other major unorthodox reality makers like Michael Asher, John Baldessarri and Don Buchla, and the opportunity he had over the past decade to witness the quick evolution of Dubai into the global, high-rise city it is today on the other side of the Persian Gulf, explains why Moshiri’s artistic strategy relies almost entirely on his observation and collection of these extremes and their amalgamation into a larger scenario he constructed himself.”²

Farhad Moshiri was born in 1963 in Shiraz, Iran. After twelve years in Los Angeles, where he completed his training at the California Institute of the Arts in the 1980s, Moshiri now lives and works between Tehran and Paris. He has developed a remarkable and hybrid visual language that draws at once from popular Iranian and Western cultures. His work has been exhibited internationally since 1989. _Go Wes_t, the first retrospective in the US of Farhad Moshiri, will be held at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg from October 13, 2017 to January 14, 2018. Encompassing several bodies of work created over decades, this mid-career survey will focus on Moshiri’s varied subject matter, deft use of language, and wide-ranging materials and methods. Curated by José Carlos Diaz, chief curator of The Warhol Museum, the exhibition will bring together paintings and sculptures that have never been displayed together, many of which are traveling to the US for the first time. The survey is accompanied by a catalogue which includes essays by contemporary art history scholars, Dr. Shiva Balaghi and Mitra M. Abbaspour, and an interview with the artist by José Carlos Diaz, The Warhol’s chief curator.

^{1. Farhad Moshiri in conversation with Nima Sagharchi, September 2014 in “Farhad Moshiri”, Skira, 2016 2. Michele Robecchi, 2014}